On the detectability by uninvolved parties of covert stratospheric aerosol injection programs producing transboundary impacts

[Geoengineering News]

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/2752-5295/ae7148

Authors: Wake Smith, Matias Alberola, Jasper G Boers, Karen H Rosenlof and Daniele Visioni

03 July 2026

DOI 10.1088/2752-5295/ae7148

Abstract

Stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI) programs are generally understood to be technologically straightforward and inexpensive relative to other climate interventions or remedies. This gives rise to the sensible question of whether uninvolved states are at risk of having their climates covertly manipulated without their knowledge by other actors. This article seeks to contextualize and ameliorate that fear. We first survey the wide range of SAI experiments and deployments that are theorized to clarify the deployed mass requirements necessary to create discernable impacts in uninvolved states. We then explore two methods that could be reliably used by civilian uninvolved parties to detect such deployments well before they reached the scale required to induce climatic impacts. These involve detecting the plumes of sulfate precursor gases shortly after their injection using existing satellite instruments capable of monitoring point source emissions and identifying the aircraft fleets and support operations that would be required to transport and release those precursors high in the atmosphere. While small process experiments with negligible surface impacts could easily be conducted covertly, we demonstrate that deployments of the scale required to create climatic impacts would be discernible by uninvolved parties well before any climatic impacts would occur.

Source: IOP Science